This article was written by a high school biology teacher and discusses a poor inquiry assignment that she had created and given to one of her Biology classes. After the assignment was over and the teacher began to grade these projects, she discovered that her students performed well on the first part of the project, but not on the second. Surprised by these results, the teacher decided to reevaluate her assignment to figure out why it produced such poor results. What the teacher discovered was that, in the second part of the assignment, she did not establish any expectations for the students to formulate explanations from evidence and she did not make connections to scientific knowledge. The author concludes the article by explaining the importance of building interpretations from evidence as a part of scientific inquiry.
The reason why I chose this article to review was because the whole class is about to begin writing our own inquiry lesson plans and I thought it would be helpful to critique someone elses to see what can go wrong. The main point that I took from this article is that inquiry learning can be a great technique in the classroom, but for it to be successful, it must be put together properly. As we have been learning all semester, students must make a connection to scientific knowledge in order for it to be meaningful. The assignment that is described in the article fails to make this connection. Also, the teacher did not provide clear expectations to her students. Although the purpose of an inquiry lesson is for students to investigate a scientific concept on their own, without providing the students with expectations for the assignment, the quality of work submitted will be highly varied and may not result in a product that the teacher had been expecting. When it comes time for me to create my inquiry lesson plan, I will be sure that the lesson allows students some freedom on how to investigate the concept, but provides a clear explanation of what the finished product of the lesson should contain.
Inquiry and Developing Explanations from Evidence
This article was written by a high school biology teacher and discusses a poor inquiry assignment that she had created and given to one of her Biology classes. After the assignment was over and the teacher began to grade these projects, she discovered that her students performed well on the first part of the project, but not on the second. Surprised by these results, the teacher decided to reevaluate her assignment to figure out why it produced such poor results. What the teacher discovered was that, in the second part of the assignment, she did not establish any expectations for the students to formulate explanations from evidence and she did not make connections to scientific knowledge. The author concludes the article by explaining the importance of building interpretations from evidence as a part of scientific inquiry.
The reason why I chose this article to review was because the whole class is about to begin writing our own inquiry lesson plans and I thought it would be helpful to critique someone elses to see what can go wrong. The main point that I took from this article is that inquiry learning can be a great technique in the classroom, but for it to be successful, it must be put together properly. As we have been learning all semester, students must make a connection to scientific knowledge in order for it to be meaningful. The assignment that is described in the article fails to make this connection. Also, the teacher did not provide clear expectations to her students. Although the purpose of an inquiry lesson is for students to investigate a scientific concept on their own, without providing the students with expectations for the assignment, the quality of work submitted will be highly varied and may not result in a product that the teacher had been expecting. When it comes time for me to create my inquiry lesson plan, I will be sure that the lesson allows students some freedom on how to investigate the concept, but provides a clear explanation of what the finished product of the lesson should contain.